Bradley is a consultant at Pragmatic Works in Jacksonville, FL. He was an author on the book SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer and tech edited the SQL 2011 Bible. His experience on the Microsoft BI platform includes DTS, SSIS, SSRS, SSAS and migrations and conversions. He has helped numerous companies in successfully developing and implementing new business intelligence solutions into their organizations. Bradley also participates as a speaker in community events like SQL Saturday, Code Camp, SQL Lunch and SQL Server User Groups. He is a contributor on sites such as BIDN.com and SQL Server Central as well as an active member of the Jacksonville SQL Server User Group (JSSUG).

On Thursday of this week I will be presenting a webinar for Pragmatic Works Free Training on the T’s. I hear Rachel is planning on doing leprechaun facts before I present and you won’t want to miss those. My topic this week is going to be SSIS Tips and Tricks.… Read more

There are a number of data types that are currently unsupported on PDW. Among those are SQL_VARIANT. The interesting part of that is that SQL_VARIANT along with several other unsupported data types are found all over the place in system tables in PDW. There is a simple solution, convert the… Read more

Thank you to everyone who attended my free webinar on August 29, 2013 where I talked about using the Data Mining Add-in for Excel. If you were unable to attend you can find the recording here. You can also check out all the Pragmatic Works Free Training videos hereRead more

Not too long ago I ran into a crazy situation where just about everything that could have gone wrong with my SharePoint environment after a restore did go wrong. I was planning on blogging a bunch of it and thanks to time constraints I had to just get it backup… Read more

Power View was a new reporting option added in the SQL Server 2012 release as part of the SharePoint integrated mode of Reporting Services. From the beginning it was limited to only reporting off tabular models (and therefore PowerPivot models as well). Power View later made its way into… Read more

There may come a day when you want to embed a Power View report into a PerformancePoint dashboard or a Web Part page in SharePoint. The first thing you will notice when entering the URL is the ribbon shows up in the web page viewer. The ribbon will be displayed… Read more

Recently while doing an installation of SharePoint 2010 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server with a SQL Server 2012 back end I ran into a small roadblock. The following error popped up as I was running the product configuration wizard.

Development and demo environments can be hard to come by. Over the course of this series you will learn how to setup all the necessary components to create your own SharePoint 2013 demo environment. We will start with a blank Windows Server 2012 VM and conclude with a fully functional… Read more

Have you ever wanted to browse your SharePoint 2010 site in Windows Explorer? If you are in SharePoint 2007 please upgrade to something a little more modern. In all seriousness, in SharePoint 2007 you could click on the Actions menu and then select Open With Windows Explorer. Simple. Easy. Read more

It was another great year at SQL Saturday Jacksonville. For the last several years I have been lucky enough to be part of the group that organizes the event. It’s definitely a lot of work leading up to the event, the others on the team definitely do more work than… Read more

Anyone who knows me will see the title of this post and tell you I’m about to trash the Surface, Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Let me assure you that’s not the case. I am a 100% openly admitted Apple fan. I have owned every version of the iPhone, have… Read more

I recently had an interesting situation where an SSIS package was scheduled to run at 1 AM but failed with a deadlock message. This seems a bit strange given that it was a deadlock on the step executing the SSIS package, not an error message from within the package. There… Read more

Recently while changing some production security around on a new server I needed to modify the SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) administrator group at the server level. This is a pretty easy process; log in, add or remove admins as necessary in the security section. However, by default any user… Read more

The SQL Server PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse) is a beast of a machine. Spreading workload across multiple nodes inside the PDW provides a huge performance gain over a traditional SQL Server; however, when laying out tables it is a little different. There are two options for creating tables on the… Read more

NOTE: Always create a backup before doing any type of Windows registry modifications!!!!

With the full public release of Windows 8 right around the corner it is inevitable that people will want to get in there and check it out. If you are working someplace that uses the Cisco VPN… Read more

I recently decided to move over to Windows 8 so I can take advantage of Hyper-V and get off a third party tool for virtualization. In the process I decided to rebuild my VM set up and modify the layout a little. Previously I had made each VM a domain… Read more

I was recently making some changes to my laptop setup and installing SQL Server 2008R2 and SQL Server 2012 directly on the computer rather than on my VM. In the case of my setup I had already installed the client tools for 2008R2 and 2012 on my laptop. So in… Read more